Spring 2013
English 4547, 20th-Century Poetry
Tues &Thurs 11:10-12:30
Campbell 209
Instructor: Brian McHale [email protected]
Denney Hall 562
Office hours: Tu Thurs 1:00-2:00pm
Description: In the twentieth century, everything changed, as far as poetry is concerned. All the
familiar assumptions about what poetry looked and sounded like, what topics it could address,
what audience it was for and what its purposes were, came under extreme pressure. The
combined pressure of modernity – the new, transformative experiences that people underwent in
the twentieth century – and modernism – the new forms and styles devised by twentieth-century
writers and artists – bent poetry out of shape, and it has never fully returned to its old shapes,
down to the present. For regular readers of poetry or those of you who aspire to write it, whether
you prefer modernist poetry or the kinds of poems that modernism threatened to sweep away, this
course is indispensable; for those who struggle to make sense of poetry or to get any pleasure
from it at all, this could be your gateway to fuller appreciation. Topics will include the
conventions of poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century; the breakthrough to free-verse
and the theory and practice of Imagism; the modernist preference for difficult poetry, including
both rationally difficult poetry and the irrationally difficult kind (including Dada and
Surrealism); and the openness of poetry to the world, including dossier poems such as Eliot’s The
Waste Land and other kinds of “wide-open” poems from Apollinaire and Cendrars at the
beginning of the twentieth century to Ginsberg, O’Hara and Ashbery near the end.
Readings: The main text will be the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry,
edited by Cary Nelson, supplemented by selected British poems and foreign-language poems in
translation, available on Carmen. Carmen texts are marked with an asterisk (*). Several readings
can be found on the Modern American Poetry (MAP) web-site:
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets.htm
This website is a valuable resource for preparing for class, researching papers, etc.; make use of
it!
Participation: You will of course be expected to read and think about all the poems
assigned for any given day. But in addition, for each class meeting you should also choose one
particular poem (or one section of a longer poem) from the day’s readings to give special
attention to. You should be prepared 1) to read that poem aloud, if called on to do so, and 2) to
say briefly what particularly interested you about that poem.
Written assignments: Two short (3-5 page) papers, each worth 30% of the final grade; a
final paper (7-10 pages), worth 40% of the final grade.
Three ways to earn extra credit:
1) Submit one or more original poems of your own that imitate specific poems from the
syllabus. Poems should also be accompanied by a short paragraph (3 to 5 sentences)
pointing out the ways in which they imitate the poems they are modeled on.
2) Attend one or more poetry readings. Document the event: if there is a flier or handout,
submit it, listing on the back the poet(s) you heard and (as best you can) the titles of the
poem(s) he/she/they read. In the absence of a flier or handout, note this information on
some other piece of paper, and submit that.
3) Poem-a-Day: Keep and submit a poetry log in which you list at least one poem not on
our syllabus that you read independently for every day of the semester – or at any rate for
five out of every seven days (you will be allowed to miss some days and still earn extra
credit). Make sure to specify: author, title, source (including whether print or online).
1 Schedule of readings
Jan
8
10
Inherited Forms
Thurs Stanza poems
*Hardy: Neutral Tones; The Darkling Thrush; *Yeats: The Lake Isle of Innisfree;
The Wild Swans at Coole; Robinson: Richard Cory; Miniver Cheevy; Frost: The
Road Not Taken; Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening; McKay: The Tropics
in New York
Tues Blank verse
Frost: Mending Wall; Home Burial; Birches; The Witch of Coös; “Out, out--”
(MAP website)
17
Thurs Sonnets
*Yeats: Leda and the Swan; Frost: The Oven Bird; Design; McKay: all except
The Tropics in New York; Millay: I, Being Born a Woman …; Love is not blind;
Oh, oh, you will be sorry …; cummings: “next to of course god america i”
New Forms (1): Free Verse
Tues Whitman: “Song of Myself” 1-2, 5-17, 24, 31-33, 47, 51-52 (MAP
website)
24
Thurs
Masters: all; Johnson: The Creation; Amy Lowell: September 1918; Sandburg:
Chicago; Cool Tombs; Grass; Pound: A Pact; Hughes: Negro; The Negro Speaks
of Rivers; Jeffers: all; *Lawrence: Snake; Swan; Bavarian Gentians
29
Tues *Pound, Cathay (except “The Seafarer”)
http://archive.org/stream/cathayezrapound00pounrich#page/n9/mode/2up
31
Thurs
Stevens: The Death of a Soldier; Williams: To Elsie; Fearing: all; Hughes: Come
to the Waldorf-Astoria (see also Graphic Interpretation, 1230-31); Niedecker:
Paean to Place; Creeley: I Know a Man; Baraka: When We’ll Worship Jesus;
*Bly, Whitman’s Line as Public Form
5
Tues Ginsberg: Howl
First paper due.
7
Thurs Roethke: North American Sequence
12
Introduction
15
22
Feb
Tues
New Forms (2): The Image
Tues
*Sappho: selected fragments; *Basho: selected haiku; *Hulme: selections;
Pound: In a Station of the Metro; *Papyrus; A Retrospect (MAP website);
Sandburg: Fog; Stevens: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird; Study of Two
Pears; Williams: The Great Figure; Spring and All; The Red Wheelbarrow;
Proletarian Portrait; H.D.: Oread; Mid-day; Sea Rose; Garden; Toomer: Portrait
in Georgia; Her Lips Are Copper Wire; MacLeish: Ars Poetica; Snyder: Riprap
2 14
19
Tues
Loy: Songs to Joannes; cummings: all except “next to of course god america i”;
Plath: Ariel
21
Thurs
*Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky (plus Humpty-Dumpty’s commentary); *Hopkins:
God’s Grandeur; “As kingfishers catch fire”; Pied Beauty; “No worst, there is
none”; Carrion Comfort; Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves;
26
Mar
Rational Difficulty
Thurs Dickinson: all; *Raine: A Martian Sends a Postcard Home
Tues
*Yeats: The Second Coming; Sailing to Byzantium; Among School Children;
Byzantium; *Heaney: three “bog poems.”
28
Thurs
Stevens: Anecdote of the Jar; The Snow Man; The Emperor of Ice-Cream; The
Plain Sense of Things; Of Mere Being; Bantams in Pine-Woods (MAP website);
Hart Crane: At Melville’s Tomb (MAP website); Proem: to Brooklyn Bridge;
*letter to Harriet Monroe
5
Tues
Moore: Poetry; The Fish; The Pangolin; Bishop: The Fish; At the Fishhouses;
The Armadillo; Robert Lowell: Skunk Hour; For the Union Dead; *Empson:
Legal Fiction
7
Irrational difficulty
Thurs Dada
*Tzara: To Make a Dadaist Poem; *Ball: Sound-Poems; *Stein: from Tender
Buttons; *Sitwell: from Façades; Crosby: all; Ashbery: They Dream Only of
America; Paradoxes and Oxymorons; *Leaving the Atocha Station (with Paul
Carroll, If Only He Had Left from the Finland Station); Mullen: all
Second paper due.
[March 11-15 Spring Break]
19
Apr
Tues Surrealism
*Breton, Ernst; *Lorca, Ode to Walt Whitman; Little Viennese Waltz; *Dylan
Thomas: five poems; *Bob Dylan: two songs
21
“All-the-above” poems
Thurs *Apollinaire: Zone; O’Hara: Today, A Step Away from Them, The Day
Lady Died, Why I Am Not Painter
26
Tues
28
Thurs Eliot: The Waste Land
2
Tues
*Cendrars: The Prose of the Trans-siberian …
Rukeyser: The Book of the Dead
3 4
Thurs Reznikoff: all; Hayden: Middle Passage
9
Tues
11
Thurs *MacDiarmid: On a Raised Beach; Ammons: Corsons Inlet
16
Tues
18
Thurs Ginsberg: A Supermarket in California (MAP website); Ashbery: Daffy
Duck in Hollywood
Ginsberg: Witchita Vortex Sutra
Silliman: The Chinese Notebook
[April 24-30 Final Exam Week]
Apr
25
Thurs
Final paper due.
*
Attendance policy. There are no automatic excused absences in this course. If you know you
will need to miss a class-meeting for some good reason, you must contact me in advance, either
in person or by e-mail, to clear it with me. If you miss a class-meeting for some reason beyond
your control, such as illness, you must bring me an official excuse or other documentary
evidence. Unexcused absence may result in a lowering of your grade, at my discretion.
Academic misconduct. It is the responsibility of the Committee on Academic
Misconduct to investigate or establish procedures for the investigation of all reported cases of
student academic misconduct. The term "academic misconduct" includes all forms of student
academic misconduct wherever committed; illustrated by, but not limited to, cases of plagiarism
and dishonest practices in connection with examinations. Instructors shall report all instances of
alleged academic misconduct to the committee (Faculty Rule 3335-5-487). For additional
information, see the Code of Student Conduct.
Plagiarism is the representation of another’s writing or ideas as one’s own. It includes
the unacknowledged word for word use and/or paraphrasing of another person’s work, and/or the
inappropriate unacknowledged use of another person’s ideas. All cases of suspected plagiarism,
in accordance with university rules, will be reported to the Committee on Academic Misconduct.
You could plagiarize and get away with it – maybe. But if you’re caught, you’ll be punished
severely. Why risk it?
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am I. Our University does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, age, disability, veteran
status, religion, sexual orientation, color or national origin. I also aspire not to discriminate, and I
hope you do, too. I aim to foster a nurturing learning environment based upon open
communication, mutual respect, and non-discrimination. Any suggestions as to how to further
such a positive and open environment in this class will be appreciated and given serious
consideration.
Disability statement. Students with disabilities that have been certified by the Office for
Disability Services will be appropriately accommodated, and should inform the instructor as soon
as possible of their needs. The Office for Disability Services is located in 150 Pomerene Hall,
1760 Neil Avenue; telephone 292-3307, TDD 292-0901. For additional information, see OSU
Office for disability Services Web Site. Any student who feels he or she may need an
accommodation based on the impact of a disability should contact me privately to discuss your
specific needs.
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